The video above shows a user interface being bucket tested by Google to select (probably randomly determined) users. Earlier today we showed a screen shot of the interface and a video of the search history, recorded by Adrian Pike, the CTO of startup Tatango. This new video, however (also recorded by Pike), shows the full Google search experience with a very Digg-like interface. Users vote search results up or down - a down vote makes it dissapear with a “poof,” an up vote moves the result to the first page.
Google is also testing comments, with linked user names, and others can vote those comments up and down. In effect, this bucket test shows a Google that combines their search algorithm with every important feature of Digg. It’s something they’ve been working on for nearly a year in various iterations, but this is the first time we’ve seen user comments, and the video shows details that you just can’t experience via screen shots.
If feedback on this is positive look for it to be added to the Google Search experimental site where anyone can opt in to use it. It’s still many steps away from being integrated into everyday search on Google, but this shows quite clearly where their head is at - Digg.
Very impressive
how do you access this feature ?
They are running a closed-beta now (only “random” people got to use it).
Regarding this implementation, it does sound interesting but I can only wonder how much time will it take for users to mass “digg”, like it has happened with Digg. And seeing Google Trend’s vulnerabilities, seems someone will do it.
Here’s why this is NOT the future of search:
(2:45) “…4 people have decided to remove Google from the first page when you search for Google… apparently…”
What isn’t clear here is whether or not Google uses the votes up and down to alter the search order. If so, I can’t imagine this not being abused beyond recognition (Google 2.0: Now with built-in Googlebombing!). If not, I just don’t care that 1287 people voted my search result up, 573 voted it down, and 3748 had something to say about it.
Oh, and if you think YouTube comments are asinine, you should see some of the idiots who use Google.
CH - your comments are applicable only if Google wasn’t also filtering users’ voting and feedback with their search algorithm. I agree that if it were completely left to users, the social features would be abused. There has to be a balance between the current ranking algorithm and the power of the people for this to work.
Who knows, this might actually reduce the amount of SEO spam out there when large amounts of people have the opportunity to mod down irrelevant results.
agreed entirely!
google should not be youtube.
quite frankly if they do this i will start searching on yahoo!
As a SEARCHER - who at the moment totally trusts googles algorithims and is always happy with the search results from google - I am not for this idea - google need to remember that they are big because they are clean and simple. Yes, a lot of the people on this blog will find this system easy - many wont. And easyness aside - I don’t want a social network on my search engine! I don’t care who votes what what - that’s for youtube - how many “oh man emos are so gay” comments do you want on music websites?
As a website owner whose invested YEARS into SEO to gain my top 3 place in google - the idea that someone can just go in and get people to click yes to something - is just horrible - and quite frankly it came down to it - I would have to fight back and employ the same group of clickers to raise me up as well.
Bad idea google. bad bad.
Very nice summary.
But… Do google have to own everything????
What do you mean by this Andy Jamo?
Ouch. I’m betting Kevin Rose is wishing he cashed up when he had one of those many opportunities.
I’d be a little worried if I were Mr Calacanis also.
Cool, I like that. Will be interesting to see if they launch this system wide.
very cool! with the summize/twitter offering, the Y!Boss initiative that we took part in (I work at Me.dium.com/search), and now this. There’s a lot going on with search right now. at last! it’s been a bit stale for a while…
Are the TechCrunchIT guys going to explore this and do a similar/expanded video?
What more is there to expand upon?
Looks really cool! Where does that leave Mahalo, especially after the powerset purchase? I know that’s Apple’s and Oranges but still. I’d like to see them take this a step further and allow you to use a slider that would make changes based on the edits you’ve done.
Should be popular, but isn’t this just a visual frontend represention of what already happens on Google’s backend, in terms of how user clicks weight future results?
y’know Google is really becoming the “Big Brother” …
what happen to Microsoft?! …
While it seems cool at first, it seems pretty easy for companies to manipulate the results by “hiring” an army of folks to rate something highly. I can imagine spammers using armies of zombies to manipulate search results too.
ZOMG — It’s reddit for search. Absolutely incredible.
@FN I was just wondering about how vulnerable these (digg + reddit ++) are for astroturfing by bots. There will always be enough humans to outweigh them, though — and counteralgorithms on the server end.
Anyone can edit their profile for this, actually, right now:
http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me/editprofile
Doesn’t enable this test for you, but still pretty interesting.
You can see all of the edits that you (haven’t) done at:
http://www.google.com/reviews/w
Since it’s at the /reviews path, I guess the service will be called Google Reviews. Makes sense, I guess.
Snore…I’d invest my time in this vs. my own collection in del.icio.us why? The real value and why I’d invest my time would be so I’d get better results based on my own preferences.
My vote: Fail.
If they compare your responses to other people with similar responses to the same stimuli, then they can give you a good guess at what what you would want to see.
Michael,
Very cool. Thank you for sharing.
Damn that totally sucks. Makes me not want to use google. so complicated
You don’t have to use the feature you know?
i don’t see why this feature is cool. is it cool bcos its done by google ? Google is going away from keep it simple approach
I’m with you.
Not cool. Personally, I don’t want my own preferences interfering with my search results 2 years down the road.
I hope everybody realizes what this is. It’s a way to generate more pageviews for google and hopefully generate more ad clicks. In the long run, the power of Google is the simplicity which could be diminished.
this should be implicit.
they could keep track of which searches people do and which results they click on - and the results they click on and stay on the longest are probably the best results for those particular keywords (and don’t record any as good if they do another search without staying on a results page for like 10s).
i know i personally click on like 20-30 results for any given query and most times they’re all shit (specifically technical queries like “rails request profiling” or “linux memory usage”). then i finally find something worthwhile and that’s the last i use that particular results set. somebody should be using all that damn work of mine at least!
feel free to give me credit for this awesome idea. somebody could probably make a company out of just placing this as a filter atop regular google results - once enough people are using the filter it should only get better. and you’d have to figure out how to prevent fraud but that wouldn’t even be too hard.
p.s. beerco chris let me know when it’s ready
It makes searches much more social. I like this, it should make better results.
This is heaven!!!! ………….. for spammers.
The funnies thing about this is I wrote google an email about 3 - 4 years ago about this very idea, never got any response or anything either.
SQUEE!!!
I can’t wait to downvote spam sites all day… I’ll happily be a free unpaid employee of Google. ¬_¬
I am actually very surprised that nobody did it before.
This version lacks a couple of very important features, but it’s definatelly a way to go. Google’s results suck if you search for “any popluar theme” and not a quote by Einstein.
There are a couple of bullet-proof technics to fight vote-spammers. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.
Would love to be able to do this for the sponsored links
It’s been done before. It’s profiled on techcrunch as well. People just don’t remember
Wow. Techcrunch has threaded comments.
Mike, you might think this is a move and the motive is to dethrone Digg, but I think otherwise. I would have agree if this feature appears on Google news rather than just web search results. Web result normally returns results that are relevant but not based on freshness. Digg works because most digg’d links are are mostly breaking news.
I agree. This would be an AWESOME feature for Google. Plus, it would introduce a great deal of Web Surfers that arn’t as involved in things like delicious to commenting and like/burys.
Re: Spam
To put any weight on a users recommendation, G will track who is actually making the recommendation and build their own backend Karma database. Meaning If I am registered in with my G account and search in normal patterns, then my recommendation will hold weight. However if I am an unsigned in user from India, Florida or known proxies (G knows them all) and I do not exhibit normal search behavior, and simply engage in spending my time rating up credit card mortgage debt sites, then this will be noted at and and all consequential actions will not be weighed in the back-end or even have a hidden ‘opposite’ effect on the rating.
with their data-set and reach it will be ‘easier’ for them to make exclusions in order to get more accurate ratings.
I agree with all the comments regarding manipulation. This is one more thing that’s going to get abused.
Yep. Think about the companies buying Adwords. I can imagine they’ll say, “Either take down the fuckin’ comments or we’re not buying anymore Adwords.”
Maybe I’m braindead, but isn’t this new Digg-like Google search experiment a response to social search upstarts like Mahalo?
Don’t you already vote on a link when you click on it? And vote it down when you don’t click on it? They’ve already implemented this.
The comments thing is interesting though.
People about crowd sourced search results. Google did that alooooong time ago.
HEck, they even measure how long you spend on the page before clicking back!
re above, GOogle has already been doing this forever.
So Google is adding human-powered search to its algorithms? It could work, it could get abused too. I’m more interested in the comments than the “digging”.
i believe it will also make ADWORDS PPC more valuable to advertisers since anyone could just simply ignore the search results.
This is ridiculous. Not everything needs to have social features to be useful.
I can only see this sort of thing distorting search results in a negative way.
I shouldn’t need a user profile and friends lists to use a search engine.
I hope they make this an isolated service when it’s all finished.
This reminds me a great deal of Wikia. I like Wikia a lot, and voting is great for niche search, but I don’t think that voting is appropriate for mainstream search.
If they build in a personal recommendation engine (like Digg’s), I could see it having great potential. If not, and they count the votes towards ranking, it sounds like an easy way to invite spam.
As far as comments, that’s ridiculous. Someone should remind Google that everything doesn’t have to be a ******* social network.
Google = Brilliancy
Well, really it’s not there idea. They ripped the whole thing off from Wikia Search.
This is a game changer. I can only assume that the reason they waited so long is that they now feel they have some sort of reasonable defense against those that will use it to juice their own results. That is indeed the secret sauce.
Seems like the greatest potential for abuse is with smaller businesses, e.g. if I am Smith’s Sign Shop in California, I might constantly enlist friends & family so that I came up ahead of Smith’s Sign Shop in Texas in a non-geo-specific search.
If they made the results relevant to your account only (e.g. what you voted up or down) that would be useful. Otherwise it seems like it’s too rife for abuse. People Digg articles they like because they’ve enjoyed them. But why would I rate search results - many times I am not searching for anything more than a name or address and as a previous poster noted, once I find it, will I go back to Google to add my rating? Probably not. So a lot of the rating will be self-promotion.
The key is that you need an active Google account to be able to ‘rank’ things. And I don’t think faking human-like usage patterns across an entire Google account over a long period of time would be very easy for a bot to do (that solves the spam problem).
It’s also important to note that Google could easily figure out how much of an authority each user is on a particular topic (and thus count his/her votes with more or less weight). This could be done by analyzing your email usage, search phrases, surfing patterns (remember, Adsense is everywhere), Google Bookmarks, Youtube viewing, Google Reader usage and on and on.
If a user has a lot of behavior related to a particular topic over a long period of time, then Google has a pretty good indicator that the person is somewhat of an authority on said topic.
It’s absolutely f’ing brilliant!
This is going to be orders of magnitude bigger than Pagerank ever was. It’s people-rank!
Mr Arrington is google sponsoring you?
This is complete rip off of sproose.com that exists since a couple of years. When techcrunch reviewed sproose the review was not as positive. Now that exactly the same is done by google you title it “the future of search”?
I always though techcrunch is more objective. At least you didn’t done your home work and reviewed your own archive.
Um…have you read the comments on here?
It’s pretty obvious that the techcrunch readers have, over time, degenerated into a bunch of fucktard, kool-aid drinkers.
I only continue to read Techcrunch because it’s a clearing house of sorts, but the quality of content has diminished as it became mainstream.
yeah, that’s us. mainstream.
This would be great within google groups, with corporate app groups, etc, but I would hate to see everyone from around the worlds comments on every search results. I feel as though ‘flaming’ would be a major issue. However, if you had control of the people you ‘follow’ (i.e. app groups) then it becomes very interesting.
The lesson from this is that a company that is leading a field as much as Google is leading search doesn’t have to jump at each trend just to be the first one out. They can sit back and watch what works and then adapt with caution. Since there is a lot at stake they are obviously careful with what they add onto their prime service. That mans also that just because Google doesn’t have the latest feature yet that they’re not already tinkering with it or at least thinking about it. For all search and social content startups that also means that you have to be darn good, fast to implement and clever in getting traction in quasi stealth mode to not be marginalized by big G’s next move. A tough field to try your luck in.
This is interesting, but it also reminds me of how people can flag an email as spam. People erroneously flag an email as spam if they don’t’ remember signing up or opting in to some sort of communication. A similar experience may happen when a user enters a broad/generic type query and the results don’t match their expectations.
I also wonder how many people will take the time to act and how are their actions evaluated. I suspect most people won’t care enough to contribute. The challenge for Google is to make sure that the people who vote are doing it for the correct reasons.
I liked it better when it was called delicious. But seriously, it’ll be interesting to see if Yahoo follows suit by integrated Delicious into the Y! SERP or Facebook uses a similar model to make a foray into search.
Social Search is for sure the “Future of Search”. Add digg and del.icio.us together to Google. Preferabkly find a way to add friendfeed on top of these and you’ll have the future of search.
Emre Sokullu’s work at Hakia.com is also a good example on what can be done at Social Search.